Politically incorrect

Review By Mary Delahunty

Political memoirs usually fall into one of two camps: the detailed tome, such as John Howard's account of his achievements in The Lodge; or the lighter touch, but no less forensic memoir of Labor industry minister John Button. Both were informative and, depending on your perspective, convincing.

Howard wrote with an unwavering eye on his place in history, while Button relished the joy of elegant prose and offered a few unflattering insights into party politics. Then there was The Latham Diaries, virulent but penetrating.

Less is more … McKew laments the trivialisation of political debate and says leaders should be less available to the media. Photo: James Brickwood

Unless you're a prime minister, a reforming national figure, a lively premier or a witness to scandal, it's hard to pen political non-fiction.

In June 2010 Maxine McKew was up close and personal to what she believes was a political scandal. Her anger as a Kevin Rudd loyalist at the coup that toppled him drives this book, but it's the insights as an insider-outsider that carry its significance. Like McKew, I was a television journalist given the unparalleled opportunity to influence the contest of ideas in politics. We both went in cold, without an apprenticeship.

Politics is a collective, a group activity. It works on the numbers, and the numbers are the shiny prize of long association or group manipulation. All new MPs are disconcerted by the high-octane activity of the parliamentary anthill, with its bells, rules and swirling allegiances shaping and reshaping like amoeba, but most MPs come to Parliament with some sort of political network, a faction, friends or foes from a political patch, a state, a region, a union.

The star recruit comes with a profile, recognition beyond the group - the gossamer thread of connection to the wider public - and a patron. The outsider is usually inducted into the political tribe by the leader: Peter Garrett by then-opposition leader Mark Latham; in my case, then-Victorian opposition leader John Brumby. McKew's patron was Rudd.

Advertisement

The book bubbles during the ''blue-sky days'' of the Kevin '07 campaign and election win. The national and historic Bennelong win (McKew is only the second Australian to defeat a sitting prime minister) is conflated, idealism and optimism fuse in the bright offer of government. The apology to the stolen generations confirmed why she was in politics, while the collapse of childcare provider ABC Learning demonstrated its limits and the hard, conflicting responsibilities.

A distinguished television and print journalist, McKew had taken the biggest risk of her life and, at first, it seemed to have paid off spectacularly: one day you're campaigning, the next you're governing. Successful television journalists are used to having every door open to them. In politics, there are a lot of closed doors.

The business of government is relentless and the default for any party is the shorthand of the collective - in and you understand, out and you are left wondering.

When Rudd's frenetic activity went into overdrive as PM, ministers and public servants reeled. Used to rigorous cabinet and caucus subcommittees in the Victorian Labor government, I was shocked at their absence under Rudd. I was also surprised at the messy line of authority that ensnared McKew. Rudd appointed her parliamentary secretary for early childhood education-childcare, reporting to his office and to the education minister.

When the coup came, McKew was blindsided. She skewers crass party apparatchiks, two of whom scuttled off to the gilded Packer empire. In the election that followed, the outsider had virtually no relationship with ALP head office or with the trade union movement. Politics is layered; it takes time to peel the party onion and you can't do it alone. She was also without her patron in power.

The policy enthusiast drawn to the contest of ideas, a woman of decency became a parliamentary oncer.

I share McKew's lament for our politics conducted through the prism of personality and vacuous sloganeering. The trivialisation of political debate, which George Megalogenis argues started with Howard's attempt to reach the battlers through Sydney talkback radio and morphed into overexposure with Rudd riffing on breakfast TV, being ribbed on afternoon radio and contemplating who he might turn gay for on late-night television, demeans us all.

McKew's solution is right, if heroic, an elevated national conversation with less media, less availability of leaders but, when they speak, more enunciation of principles. This relies on respect for the job of the serious journalist and the serious prime minister.

Mary Delahunty was an ABC TV journalist, a minister in the Bracks government and the author of Public Life: Private Grief (Hardie Grant).